Technology offers the Seventh-day Adventist Church new and more effective ways of advancing the church’s mission, according to participants in a conference sponsored by Southern Adventist University’s School of Computing.

The conference, called “ComputingAndMissions.Net 2001,” ran June 27 to July 1 and brought together more than 60 pastors, administrators, and technical experts from North America and the Caribbean Islands. Its goal was to share ideas and to explore how technology can more effectively be used in supporting the work of the Adventist Church. Topics covered included, “What Church Administrators, Pastors, and Missiologists want from Technologists,” “Bible Studies by Internet,” “Building Church Web sites,” and “Computer Tools for Strategic Research.”

The conference highlighted the surprising extent to which technology is already being used to communicate the Gospel, says Jared Bruckner, a conference organizer. One example is an innovative video-conferencing system that Adventist World Radio (AWR) has set up in Tahiti. The islands of Tahiti, spread over an area as large as the United States, have many small churches and few pastors. AWR has installed a video-conferencing system so that the smaller churches, without a regular pastor, can watch a live satellite downlink of the Sabbath, or Saturday, worship service taking place in one of the larger churches. During Sabbath School, questions and comments from the smaller churches are transmitted back to the larger church using inexpensive Web cameras.

“This is how we are using technologies now—not as toys, but as tools to spread the Gospel,” says Daryl Gungadoo of Adventist World Radio.

Plans are underway for another conference June 26 to 30, 2002.  Home to more than 2,000 students, Southern Adventist University is located in Collegedale, Tennessee, United States.